Super Moon


What’s Wrong with a Super Blue Blood Moon?

It was cloudy here on the morning of Jan. 31st, so we didn’t get to see the lunar eclipse – or photograph it.  Fortunately, my friend Mike McKeag was in southern California and managed to get this great shot of the Moon with background stars. I did get a lot of questions about this much-hyped event, so thought I’d summarize the answers here: A “Super Moon” just means that the Moon is near the time in its orbit where it is closest to Earth (at perigee), so it appears bigger and brighter. Since no one pays much attention to it […]


The “Super Moon”

You may have heard that tomorrow’s Full Moon will be the largest “Super Moon” since 1948.  Wile this is an interesting factoid, and astronomers generally love to get any kind of attention in the press, the case for “Super Moons” is a little over-stated. The apparent size of the Moon varies over time because the distance between Earth and the Moon varies slightly – from 221,500 miles to 238,900 miles.  The way that this distance changes is quite complicated, due to the strong influence of the Sun and the fact that there is not an integral relationship between the orbital […]